Monique Truong is the author of the “poetically rendered and literally savory” 2003 novel, The Book of Salt, the fictional story of a gay Vietnamese cook who worked for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris during the 1920s and 30s, and his previous life in Vietnam. Truong was born in Saigon in 1968 and moved to the U.S. at the age of six. She graduated from Yale University and Columbia University School of Law. The Book of Salt among other honors received the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Gittings Literature Award, and the Young Lions Fiction Award, and was given an Award of Excellence from the Vietnamese American Studies Center at San Francisco State University. Truong is also the co-editor of Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, with Barbara Tran and Luu Truong Khoi, and numerous essays and works of short fiction. Truong’s new book, Bitter in the Mouth, will be published by Random House in 2010.

The UCSC Center for Labor Studies is funded by the Miguel Contreras Labor Fund of the University of California Office of the President, and co-sponsored by the UCSC Division of Humanities.

The UCSC Living Writers Reading Series is hosted by the Creative Writing Program of the Literature Department. In addition to the Miguel Contreras Fund, this event was generously supported by a Diversity Fund Grant from the UCSC Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor, and by Poets & Writers, through a grant from the James Irvine Foundation, and co-sponsored by the Asian American and Pacific Islander Resource Center, the East Asian Studies Studies Program, the Porter College George Hitchcock Poetry Fund and the Laurie Sain Creative Writing Fund.

For more information or accommodations, contact the UCSC Institute for Humanities Research, ihr@ucsc.edu, (831) 459-5655. For maps, maps.ucsc.edu.

Click here to view the event poster as a PDF.